How to Develop a Microsoft Project Communications Management Plan

It isn’t rocket science, but you still have to determine up front which information you might want to track, when you might want it, and in which form. You might want to check out How to Avoid Common Project Management Pitfalls.

Step 1 of your Project communications management plan: gather data

You can then input that information into Project in several ways: Use various views and tables to enter information in sheets of data, enter information in the Task Information dialog box, or use the tracking tools in the Schedule group of the Task tab on the Ribbon.

The amount of data you collect is determined by the information you need to track and the level of detail. For example, some people use Project only to create a timeline for their activities. Others use resources and track their total work on tasks, just not to the level of detail that scrutinizes hourly work performed. For some people, simply marking one task 50 percent complete and another 100 percent complete — and letting Project assume that all resources completed their estimated amounts of work — is fine.

Step 2 of your Project communications management plan: apply a tracking method

• Task – total
• Task – time phased
• Assignment – total
• Assignment – time phased

Suppose that the Test Electrical Components task is estimated to take 12 hours of work, according to the project baseline. An Engineer, Electrician, and Assistant — three human resources — are assigned at 100 percent of their time. Tracking by task – total, you can simply note that the task is 75 percent complete, which translates into nine hours of work finished.

Project assumes that the three resources split the work equally — three hours for each resource. In reality, however, the Engineer spent one hour, the Electrician spent six, and the Assistant spent two. Therefore, the time phased variable enters the picture. Time-phased tracking uses specific time increments, whether you choose to track work by task or work completed by individual resources on the task.

So, in the Test Electrical Components task, you can use the task – time phased approach to track the nine hours on a daily basis. Or you can use the assignment – time phased approach to track each resource’s work, hourly or daily.

If the project or organization doesn’t require detailed assignment or time-phased tracking, you’re better off using the task – total method. Then you can spend less time entering information into Project and more time managing the team and the stakeholders.

Step 3 of your Project communications management plan: use the tracking tools

The tracking buttons.

These tools make specific updates to selected tasks:

• Percent Complete: Click this tool to quickly mark a task’s progress using a rough calculation of the percentage of work completed in 25 percent increments.
• Mark on Track: Selecting a task and clicking this tool records activity automatically to the status date as you scheduled it in the baseline.
• Update Tasks: To display a dialog box that contains tracking information about the progress, duration, start, and finish dates, find this tool on the menu that opens when you click the down arrow on the Mark on Track button. For example, you can indicate whether a task’s actual start date varied from its current start date. The following figure shows the Update Tasks dialog box.

The Update Tasks dialog box.

You can use a few more tools, found elsewhere in Project, to track and illustrate progress:

• Update Project: Mark all tasks in a project as complete to a specific status date. You can also use this tool to reschedule uncompleted work.
• Move Task: Reschedule all or part of a selected task. You can use this tool, found in the Tasks group on the Task tab on the Ribbon, to move a task forward or backward or to reschedule parts of it by the status date.
• Add Progress Line: Turn on a type of drawing tool. On the Format tab, in the Format group, click Gridlines. Click the down arrow and select Progress Lines. A dialog box appears so that you can, at particular dates, set up progress lines: They indicate which tasks are ahead of or behind schedule by way of a vertical line that connects in-progress tasks.

For everything, there’s a Microsoft Project view

Task Sheet—Tracking table view.

Task Usage—Tracking table view.

Task Usage—Usage table view.

When tracking using the Task Sheet view, I insert a column that shows percent complete. To insert the column, simply right-click a column head and click Insert Column, then click % Complete.